BlogTipsEnlistCommunityLinks
Make a donationTroop DigsE-mail
GG: 949 Ava San Diego, USA: “I sent you pictures from an abandoned tree-well from a couple of years ago. Then I noticed that the city (San Diego) was planning to fix the sidewalk so I figured my little succulent garden would be destroyed. Instead, someone kindly wrapped "danger" tape around the plants, and INCREASED the size of the "garden." I watched it for a couple of weeks, and as no one came to plant it, I took cuttings from my succulent garden at home and expanded the guerrilla garden. Keep digging, Ava 949”Ava 949
Before (circa 2008)Ava's first guerrilla gardening
Recent unexpected enlargementAva has extended her guerilla garden
GG: 2744 Val Malborough, Wiltshire, UK: “I moved to Kennet Place in Marlborough 14 years ago - the river was full of bottles and cans and the bank was just horrible - no one had done anything to it. Now have daffs, snowdrops, primroses and a buddleia, it's mown and then the idea caught on and one of the local property landlords got a strimmer for his tenants but for me to use too, then another big property owner tackled and long narrow verge round the corner and that's now full of daffs too!”Guerrilla gardening in Malborough
GG: 13648 Kat and Fran 13649 Portsmouth, UK: “Here are two photos from me and my friend Fran in action yesterday. we weeded the patch I started on May 5, tidying and watering, plus, we sowed some wild - and sunflower seeds, fingers crossed it will rain soon!!! Fran is new to guerrilla gardening but she loved it, so now I have a partner in crime and against grime and neglect, which is very nice. only two people stopped to talk to us, they were very drunk and worried we were "sleeping rough". (do we REALLY look so bad in the photos?!)” Kat and Fran guerilla gardening in Portsmouth
GG: 13563 Nadine Montreal, Canada: “I convinced a friend, who I work with that the pitiful condition of the bed underneath the tree in front of our downtown Montreal office could not be abided another day without some guerrilla action. We planned and plotted to go one spring night and make things 'right'. With a car full of tools, blood meal, water containers and plants (of course) we cleaned up the cigarette butt infested earth and took over. We're hooked and can water during out lunch hours .Now onto our next adventure!!! Watch out Montreal.”Guerilla gardening Montreal 2010
GG: 8229 Micah and friends Florida, USA: “Thanks for the inspiration GG!!! Three of us apartment renting college students at the University of Florida in Gainesville decided to spruce up the unused bike rack area in front of our building. All the other tenants love it, especially the ladies. : )”Guerilla gardening
Before guerrilla gardeningAfter guerrilla gardening
GG: 2686 Luca and team Pezzana, Italy: “We are a team of frends who decided to do some guerrilla in our village. The place is a flowerbed abandoned at the entrance of the village (Pezzana is the name of the village, near Vercelli). We made our job at 11pm of the 30 Oct 2009, with the fog and the cold weather, but it was really funny! We were in 5 people. The marrow was 46 kilos heavy, and it's also the symbol of Pezzana. We are very proud of our job and we want to make another guerrilla action in spring. Ciao from Luca, Patty, Michele, Sandra, Marina and Giuseppe!”Guerrilla gardening in Pezzana, Italy. AFTER
Before
GG: 5526 Crina and 5527 Ionut Bucharest, Romania: “It's the first guerrilla gardening action in Bucharest: we planted grass and flowers on the central boulevard of the capital, near a square at B-dul Magheru on June 23. We were two, the girl in the pictures (Crina 5526) and the guy behind the camera (Ionut 5527). It took almost 1 hour and the little square soon became green! Enjoy your plantings!Crina mid way through guerrilla gardening
After guerrilla gardening in BucharestCrina guerrilla gardening
Lund Sweden. There's a playground near where I live (city of Lund, southern Sweden), with lots of gaps in the flower beds and an enormous lack of colour. I have previously planted some crocus there, but now it was time for some more action. My cousin Ida came over for dinner, and I asked her to help me plant some pansies along the hedge. The man at the town square had promised to save me 20 pansiesAfter
but he had forgotten, so I had to do a last minute raid to all the central flower shops to find some equally cheap plants. We went out at 5.30 pm and cleared the weeds, dug in some plant soil and planted yellow and dark purple Ida 3713 and Li 3710
pansies. It was all done in less than 30 minutes, and no one stopped to ask what we were doing. There were no children out to play, either. We were very pleased with the result, and hope others will enjoy it too. I will no doubt continue gardening the flower beds around the playground in the future, much can still be done there.
1608 Sophia and 1616 Hannah. Vienna, Austria. Me and my neighbor decided to plant some flowers at a small place in   our street that is normally mistreated by the dogs of the eight   district of vienna. so we went to the supermarket and got some earth and seeds. then we   cleared up the space from dog shit, roots, leaves, cigarettes and   random things like glass and metall screws. i got some plastic   gloves from my university laboratory. we had loads of fun while   digging the whole thing up. The strange thing was that the other   people didn't show much reaction, but actually that's not that   surprising in austria sadly. we hope that people will stop trashing   and respect our effort.
GG: 1557 Elise, Rue Lhomond Paris, France Elise wrote to me with news of two new guerrilla gardens she has planted in Paris.. “My name is Elise. I am a French woman, aged 71. Sometimes last Spring, I heard on one of the French radios a report of your activities. I was immediately delighted and interested, being by nature strongly independent and against any form of authority and conformism. Challenging authority is for me a must (with a wink & great pleasure for doing so !), I know it might sound stupid at my age, but this is so ! So, I immediately sensed that Guerrilla
Gardening was something just for me. In addition, we are in my family (contrarily to most French people) strongly interested in gardening and plants. I lived in the country when I was young, and a link with nature is important to me...”
Read the full report and more pics at the page here.
GG: 2893 Swamp Tree Nelly Freemont, California “Today we planted a Jacaranda next to a existing Illawarra flame (Brachychiton acerifolius) tree, someday it will look like the image (right). It was a RUSH planting a tree without permission. One gentleman walked by and I said we were doing a guerilla tree planting and I hope we don't get in trouble - he said it will be OK! There were some contractors working on a house the next door over and they brought us a bucket of soil IN A TRACTOR to build a watering well - Using tree savor from plant health care will help the tree establish quicker.”Guerrilla gardening (artists impression) in Freemont California
GG: 1975 Lea
New Zealand Litter clearance and collection can become a big part of a guerrilla gardener’s mission. Occasionally I hear from people dedicated to this cause, though seldom of those who have the company and service of an animal in the fight against filth: “When I was young, you didn't see rubbish such as plastic bottles. Now, even where I live in New Zealand, we have beautiful green countryside and forests spoilt by people carelessly throwing their rubbish out car windows or from bikes. The grassy road verges hide ugly
secrets of broken glass and plastic. Only last week we picked up shards of glass from what must have been a sizable broken mirror someone had thrown out. Children are taught at school to care for their environment so I wonder what sort of people do this. I walked almost daily with a donkey up to 7 kms though due to a health problem I could not walk for about 4 months last winter but am working up again and now it is 5 kms and improving. About three years ago we began regularly picking up rubbish along the way and my old donkey Rosalie carried it on her back, soon becoming accustomed to the tins banging together and rattling stuff. Sadly Rosalie died last February and I miss her very much but a new young donkey has come. Donkeys are very much maligned in the world today and these sensitive and intelligent animals suffer terribly from human ignorance.
GG: 2958 Sofie, Linda 2959 and Sofia 2960 Gothenberg Sweden “We are a group of three girls in Gothenburg, Sweden and we think guerrilla gardening is a great way to save the world. We have planted beautiful winter flowers in Gothenburg, where there was non. The idea of making the world more beautiful is important to us. The place were the action was is called 'Bältespännar Parken', and is in the central of Gothenburg, at the Aveny. We have also made our own seed bombs and today we handed them out to the public with the receipe and this web address, hoping that this is spreading”.Guerrilla gardeners in Sweden
Making seed bombsSeed bombs
GG 4347 Nisaba Australia. Wholly unknown to myself, I've been Guerilla-gardening for years, reverse-guerilla-gardening like stealing cuttings and seed-heads, real guerilla-gardening like and scattering native seed and planting choko vines against fences (to see most of 'em get ripped out). I discovered the site, and therefore the name, a single day before my car blew up, which was really frustrating because I love inspired, life-affirming subversion and I see guerilla gardening as another subversive arrow Golden tyre after
I can add to the quiver already containing freecycling and bookcrossing. When I reclaimed my car, I asked the mechanic to stuff the back of it with as many worn-out tyres as possible, and I scored 21 beautiful tyres, not only in the back of my station wagon but also in the back-seat, and in the front passenger seat. I went to about the only shop that sold enamel spray-paint around here (and they looked very oddly at a non-teenager with healthily middle-aged wrinkles buying the stuff!), and spray-painted one of the tyres golden, cost about $4.00. I went to a nursery and laid in some tat soi, giant red mustard, chives, bok choi, yarrow, and marjoram, total cost $26.00. I already had a couple of bags of $2.98 compost-rich potting mix and a jar of water-storage crystals lying around, and I invested $5.00 in a bag of good, well-broken-down, wood-based mulch. I also raided my veggie patch out the back for some of my excess asparagus
seedlings (all of 5cms high), an infant elder tree grown from a stolen cutting, and a single rose seedling from seeds taken from plants where many varieties of roses were planted close together and would have cross-pollinated - thus, a Pot Luck Rose. This morning I also got an empty and washed 1.5 litre cranberry juice bottle, cut the bottom off it, and drive a fine drill-bit through the lid to form three or four drainage holes, replacing the lid. I loaded the back of my station wagon and went out for my first formal, fully-informed Guerilla Gardening exercise. I had Before
in mind a strip of -er- what laughingly passes for grass around here, a piece of neglected land near a bus stop where, when my car blows up, I have to catch buses. I'm not terribly strong, and when I gave a hoy in the forums for other people in my area no one answered, so I decided that using car tyres as the basis of raisedd garden beds would work well for me. I parked totally illegally in the bus stop, unloaded my car into the bus shelter, jumped back into the car and parked it around the corner. When I came back, none of my supplies or tools had been stolen. I first laid the tyre down - painted golden, it looked instantly terrific even empty. Then I laid a shallow layer of potting mix inside it, which I topped with a generous layer (almost half a jar) of water storage crystals - the area might be soggy now after winter rains, but come spring and summer it will be parched, and I probably won't be able to irrigate it every second day so I want it to last out the week. Then I positioned the abbreviated bottle, lid tightly on, upside-down at
the "back" of the tyre, where it will be concealed when things start growing, and where I'll still be able to pour in a supply of water to be slow-leaked into the garden bed. I topped up with enough potting mix to bring it up to a decent level, which for my own future information, will take one and a half complete bags per tyre. At this stage, before any plants had gone in, a dear little old lady with a huge, toothy and equally elderly dog, came tottering along the path where my spade, trowel, plants and empty plastic bags were scattered. She gave me a friendly - and curious - smile, but obviously was too shy to say something directly, so I decided to give her an "in" into a conversation, and fussed over her dog. She introduced him as "Marcus" and I fussed over him a bit, which opened up psychic space for her to fall into conversation with me. I didn't use the words "internet" or "guerilla gardening", but I explained that it was an ugly little strip of land and that I thought I'd set up a mini-garden here. I showed her my cardboard box of punnets and loose seedlings, and told her that the mustard and bok choi although edible were lovely leafy plants
that looked really good, that the yarrow would have wonderful yellowish-white flower-heads, and that the asparagus fern have a lovely soft fern-leaf. She kept saying over and over "What a lovely thing to do! You're so nice, what a lovely thing to do!". Eventually she and Marcus tottered away and I started divvying up punnets and planting. I put in four asparagus, close to and surrounding the bottle-irrigator, the elder cutting (whcih had already developed good roots) in the dead-centre, and around the edges margjoram which will eventually trail, and hte other herb and vegetable seedlings. The potting mix was very damp but I still sprinkled them with a little water that I had brought in another bottle and then filled the irrigator with the remainder of it, and took out handsful of the mulch and carefully positioned it around and under the tiny plants. Eventually I was satisfied with my handwork, walked arround the corner, brought my car back, parked it illegally at the bus stop again, and shoved all my tools and left-over supplies in the back. As I was loading up an middle-aged gent who was visibly damaged by something like alcohol, drugs or even jsut severe mental illness, wandered up and said "What's this?", so I explained again I was giving a garden to the world. He was very disapproving and told me "they would eat it around here". I refuse to believe he had enough brains to recognise edible plants when he saw them, so the only other alternative was that he was so crazy he thought eating newly-established garden beds was normal
normal human behaviour in his suburb. He kept looking at it and looking at me, expecting me to pull it all apart and take it away with me now that I had the benefit of his vast wisdom about the community. I out-stared him, and eventually he tapped his head at me to imply I was crazy and wandered away. I had taken the "before" shot [attached] yesterday, so when I took my stuff home I came back with my camers for the two "after" shots, racing, because I thoguht it was a fair bet we'd wait till I wasn't there and come back to eat my garden-ette, since he seemed to think that was acceptable. He was nowhere to be seen and my garden was, as you can see, intact. In future I plan to do more gold-tyred mini-gardens around the region: the total cost was less than $40 to me, plus I had paint, soil and heaps of seedlings leftover for my own veggie patch at home, which I'm going to go out and plant right now, and as I get better and more organised about doing it, I'm sure it will cost me less than the hour, all-up, that it took. In a few months, when it has had a chance to grow, I'll go out and photograph it again. And now I'm going to sign off, fill my watering-can so as to replace the moisture that the water crystals would have sucked out of the soil (or just soak them toroughly), and plant the lion's share of the seedlings bought into my own herb and veggie garden. I can sense that every so often a gold tyre filled with dirt and plants is going to appear in my region ...
The grass verge by Clapham High Street station was until 10 days ago a dowdy, overgrown magnet for empty beer receptacles and remnants from KFC dinners.  Kate, Rachael, Mattel, TTB John, Amy, and Flash, Sally & Albert have cleared the rubbish and after some weeding planted a mixture of bright flowers – poppies, sunflowers, daisies and others – garden herbs, and wild flower seeds. The idea is to brighten up the day of commuters who use or go past the station and make our part of the world a still nicer place to live in.  We plan more work, with a realGuerrilla gardening outside Clapham High street station
need to prune some of the troubled trees and to keep the other plants we have introduced well nourished, loved and cared for. Let's make sure these wild flower seeds get the encouragement to grow into a hardy meadow!  Whilst lager and pop cans and bottles are still appearing we have written to the Council asking them to put a recycling bin nearby. We also have our eyes on a couple of garden gnomes who, together with the dazzling flora, will hopefully convince passers by to enjoy this new space as a new public resource Before the guerilla gardening
to be treasured.  Thanks a lot all who helped, hope to see you there soon.  Budget: Approx £90, including a £10 donation from a passer by. Lots of love. Sally & AlbertThe plants
GG: 3478 Kate and 3555 Jude Greenbridge Road, Swindon, England As part of their publicity plan for On Guerrilla Gardening Bloomsbury initiated a mission to spruce up the miserable industrial estate where WHSmith, one of Britain’s biggest, booksellers, has their head quarters. Beneath a concrete pillar on a grassy verge that welcomes visitors to their car park was a smashed beer bottle and scrappy weeds so out they Kate Tindal Roberton and Jude Drake guerrilla gardening
came and in went fresh compost, primulas, narcissi, yarrow, a couple of white roses and a colourful placard of the book. Police called by but after a brief chat were no trouble.Stella Artois bottle replaced by primulas
GG: 2110 Ben York Mills Road Toronto, Canada My Grandmother died last week. As I'm sure she had planned, she passed away just before we arrived. She was a determined woman with a great sense of humor and had insisted on being cremated in a cardboard box rather than money wasted on a funeral. We threw a big party and had a good chuckle about her life. Anyway, I'm telling you this because I thought you might appreciate the spontaneous act of GuerrillaBen 2110 and his sister Atonia guerrilla gardening in Toronto
In goes the primula
<p></p> <p>Gardening that took place after her memorial party. We'd bought flowers for the party in brilliant purple and pink, the colours she often wore. On the way back from the party we drive past a Tim Horton's coffee shop. My grandmother was such a coffee drinker that she used to salute Tim Horton's every time she was driven past one, even after she lost the power of speech. We'd given most of the pots away but I'd saved one primula which we planted in a disused concrete planter in front of her local Tim Horton's. Knowing her wit she'd have been the first out of the car digging a hole.
GG 3321 Scot Long Beach, California “It is a center median so it's 'owned' by the city. The city had done little upkeep for many years. As the before pictures show there were four palms and a few Gazania's planted. The garden took many trips before work usually planting 30 to 40 plants at a time. This street has a fair amount of traffic so I have to be careful when working. I do my planting in the early morning, Saturdays being best for traffic. I use succulentsGuerrilla gardening at Long Beach California
for a few reasons. They don't require any watering once their established a good rooting. They are very easy to propagate from cuttings, rhizomes, bulbils and the like. I've taken out hundreds of plants from this location alone. I take them home, root them and replant them in this or other gardens.”
Click here for more Troop Digs